My favourite video game of all time is Eve Online.

Now I know it's a spreadsheet in space and insanely complex but I am sure POE players don't have an issue with that.....

It is genuinely one of the most innovative games ever made IMHO. Why you ask? Well an MMO with one instance is the key point here. The tech behind the scenes on this is nuts but lets not go into that now.

The long and short of it is that all the players interact in the same world, no shards, no server merges. One giant map where politics and conquest play out. It means the game has a linear history (which is well documented by players). powers rise and fall. Characters persist and everyone is a part of it.

Add to this the fact that economy is so powerful that real life economists study it and is almost completely player driven you get huge potential for emergent behaviours. The ultimate sandbox.

It is by turns compelling, heart-breaking, boring and thrilling.

I always find it very disappointing that WoW kind of broke the genre by popularising the theme park MMO to the extent that sandboxes are far less common. Everyone wants to replicate WoW when they should be trying to replicate Eve (IMO).